Urban Farming for Cash Gains a Toehold in San Francisco

Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway are a common sight on the streets of the Mission district — covered in dirt and carrying baskets of salad mix from their backyard farm to Bar Tartine, a stylish upscale restaurant.

“We’re fairly scrappy ladies and often pretty dirty,” said Ms. Galloway, 29, a part-time sign painter who founded Little City Gardens with Ms. Budner, 29, last year.

But their new piece of land — three-quarters of an acre on a quiet residential block in the outer Mission — is now mostly quiet and overgrown with weeds and without much sign of the lettuce, kale, arugula, purslane, lemon balm and other greens for which the women are known.

The problem is the legality of selling vegetables grown in San Francisco without a special permit, an expensive and time-consuming requirement for a small, low-profit business.

Even as the hype around urban agriculture and the local-food movement has exploded, laws governing land use are still stuck in another era, one that frowned on farming in the city, especially in residential areas, experts in urban planning say.

“There was an effort to zone agriculture out; it wasn’t seen as the highest and best use of the land,” said Jennifer Wolch, dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. “Culturally, there was a shift in the postwar period where it was unacceptable.”

A changing attitude and new ventures like Little City Gardens are now prompting city planners to consider revising zoning laws.

San Francisco is set to roll out significant changes this fall, following cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Mo., and Seattle. The new rules would let city farmers sell their produce without the old roadblocks and enshrine 21st-century urban agriculture in the books.

AnMarie Rodgers, a San Francisco city planner and the daughter of an Iowa pig farmer, is circulating a draft zoning change — one that has not been made public — that she hopes will be introduced in mid-September. It has the support of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who last year ordered the city to increase healthy and sustainable food.

Photo

Caitlyn Galloway weeding a test plot on Wednesday at the urban farm in the Outer Mission that she leases with her partner, Brooke Budner.Credit
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

“There are beginning to be relatively small-scale gardening operations that are running up against the constraints of the current code,” Ms. Rodgers wrote in a recent memo to city officials. “This is an issue that cities around the country are grappling with, and many big cities are revising or considering revising their zoning codes to support at least small-scale urban agriculture.”

San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are full of gardens in backyards and schoolyards and on rooftops and vacant lots. From the chef Alice Waters’s famed edible schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Berkeley to City Slicker Farms and the People’s Grocery, which are trying to bring fresh produce to West Oakland, the Bay Area’s innovative horticultural endeavors are widely known.

But when vegetables are exchanged for cash, it’s a different story.

Sophie Hahn, a Berkeley community activist and stay-at-home mother, is growing enough vegetables for six families in her backyard. Wanting to recoup some of her investment from neighbors to whom she has been giving the vegetables, Ms. Hahn looked into getting the right paperwork from the city. She found that obtaining a permit for home businesses like teaching piano, tutoring and even growing medical marijuana was easy, without public hearings or great expense. A backyard “community supported agriculture” venture was a different story.

“It’s actually easier in Berkeley to have a pot collective than to have a vegetable collective,” said Ms. Hahn, a former candidate for City Council who is putting together a legislative solution she plans to take to the Council.

For now, Ms. Hahn gives away the beets, basil, beans and everything else that grows in her North Berkeley yard.

Little City Gardens started out small, with 2,500 square feet of donated land near 18th and Guerrero Streets. But Ms. Budner, a part-time illustrator, and Ms. Galloway decided they wanted to make an experiment of their venture: Could they — or anyone for that matter — actually make a living as urban farmers?

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“In the last couple of years, there’s been huge jazz around urban agriculture,” Ms. Galloway said this week. “ A lot of projects seem symbolic or temporary, and I’m excited about celebrating those, but we wanted to do something that makes farming a permanent part of the city.”

They got an informal go-ahead from the San Francisco Planning Department, but a complaint from a neighbor in May brought scrutiny. The verdict was that Little City Gardens must get a conditional-use permit, which can cost up to $3,000 and take three to five months to complete, if they wanted to sell their produce.

Ms. Galloway and Ms. Budner saw that decision as a barrier to entry for farmers on small budgets and smaller plots. So instead of paying, they decided to fight. Citing Mayor Newsom’s edict for more healthy food in the city, they sought a change in the law.

Market gardens like Little City Gardens would also be permitted in all areas of the city, whether in a residential or industrial area, if they were less than an acre. Operations of more than an acre would be allowed in areas zoned for industrial use. The new permit would cost a bit over $300.

There are two primary conditions, Ms. Rodgers said: No marijuana, and farms must abide by certain rules, like locating compost away from neighbors and limiting use of heavy machinery. Pesticides and herbicides permitted by the federal government would be allowed.

Ms. Rodgers said the trigger for a more extensive permitting process would now be the farm’s impact on the neighborhood, rather than just the sale of vegetables.

The proposal and the push for it are not without critics. Some are wary of overregulation. Others do not think that clearing the way for urban farming as a business in San Francisco — with its high land prices and slivers of vacant land — will benefit anyone except food enthusiasts with money to burn at fancy restaurants.

“Any public investment, even in changing the zoning code, has to be mindful of public benefit,” said Mary Beth Pudup, a professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “A lot of the urban-food movement can kind of skew to the high end.”

Not-for-profit-farmers are watching with great interest.

“In the Bay Area, I am really interested to see if people can make a profit because land is so valuable and how much can you really produce,” said Barbara Finnin, executive director at City Slicker Farm, a nonprofit in West Oakland.

Meanwhile, Ms. Budner and Ms. Galloway have cleared part of their parcel, built a greenhouse, even tilled a small section and hauled in horse manure. But with the changes in the zoning code working their way through the system, they have yet to plant much. They did put in a short row of sunflowers near the entrance of the property, just behind a chain-link fence, which they water with their water bottles. The flowers are now about knee high.

Ms. Galloway said they had wanted to plant at least something while they waited.

“We planted the sunflowers out of desperation,” she said.

zelinson@baycitizen.org

A version of this article appears in print on August 13, 2010, on Page A17A of the National edition with the headline: Urban Farming for Cash Gains a Toehold in San Francisco. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe